Fatal error during installation of Windows Azure SDK for .NET – November 2011

This blog post explains what to do if you get any of the following exceptions when trying to install Windows Azure (or you may get the 2nd exception below when you do F5 for your first Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010)

Fatal error during installation!

“There was an error attaching the debugger to the IIS worker process for URL …..” in Visual Studio 2010.

If you are using the WebPI for installing Windows Azure, you may fumble upon the following nasty error!

If you do get this, follow the instructions below and you should be good:

The fatal error should now go away. And the tools and libraries should now be installed properly.

We generally tend to think WebPI is magical and it will automatically take care of everything, but sometimes it may not (cases when IIS is messy and if you installed IIS after .Net framework 4.0 etc). The above steps take not more than 15 mins and you should be up and ready.

You may also have to follow the above steps when you get the below exception in Visual Studio- “There was an error attaching the debugger to the IIS worker process for URL …”.

At least after a day’s research thats what I ended up doing. This error in Visual Studio essentially means that IIS is messed up in terms of app pool mode or WAS installation is not proper. Best is to follow the above instructions and it’s faster than any other approach unless you want to guess what was installed in what order and repair it using that approach step by step.

2 Responses to Fatal error during installation of Windows Azure SDK for .NET – November 2011

Hi Phani,
Nice post. Want to share some info regarding the 2nd error as you mentioned here. If IIS is restarted then it will work normally, this worked in my case many times. and as the azure portal points to Latest version SDK 1.6 but actually SDK 1.6 is still not supported in Azure. It supports only Windows Azure SDK version 1.5 (September 2011) or older. Please check the below matrix report for Guest OS with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. Initailly we used SDK 1.6 for our development purpose and faced issues after moving to cloud, so switched back to SDK 1.5.